President Gephardt?

John Doggett is a business school professor, management consultant and lawyer who lives in Austin, Texas. In 1998, Talkers Magazine selected John as one of the 100 Most Influential Radio Talk Show Hosts in America . In 1997, Headway Magazine selected John as one of the 20 Most Influential Black Conservatives in America.

Al Gore frightens liberal and “progressive” Democrats. They see Big
Al as a chameleon who will say anything and abandon any principle if
that is what it takes to become president. Earlier this week, WND
published Radley Balko’s scathing column, “Stay and Fight,” on why no one
should trust Al. Once you read it, you will understand why Al’s
campaign is not viable.

Bill Bradley also frightens liberal and “progressive” Democrats.
They see Big Bill as an elitist loner who is not even sure that he is a
Democrat. They remember Bradley’s decision to leave the U.S. Senate
right as things were getting hot. They bitterly remember his “I will
not run for reelection” speech. He attacked both parties and suggested
that he might run as an independent presidential candidate in 1996.
Political analysts know that if Bradley had run as an independent
presidential candidate during the last election, Bill Clinton would have
lost.

Earlier this week, WND featured Joe Conason’s withering column on
Bradley, titled, “The Faker.” This column
asks, “What has presidential candidate Bill Bradley ever done to deserve
the support of liberals?” Conason’s column is an eye opener about the
priorities of the liberal wing of the Democrats.

We all remember Al’s tearful acceptance speech in 1996 where he
talked about the horrors of tobacco and his sister’s death from cancer.
What Big Al failed to mention is that his family became wealthy by
growing and selling the same tobacco that he was so piously attacking.

We all remember that Al said nothing about Monica. Nope, I forgot.
After Bill Clinton admitted to the world that he had lied about Monica,
Al called him the greatest president of this century. America
rightfully sees Al as Bill Clinton’s biggest fan. For many of us,
that’s all we need to know that we don’t want a President Al.

We all remember that Al said nothing about the scandals involving
China. Apparently, he was too busy defending his own hide with his “no
controlling legal authority” speech to be concerned about our national
security. However, Bill Clinton is not Al’s biggest Clinton problem.

Hillary Clinton will make Al’s life worse. Hillary’s run for the
Senate guarantees that Al cannot put Bill behind him. When she declares
as an official candidate, she will have to answer all of the questions
that she and Bill have dodged. Every time she talks, she will remind
people of Big Al’s role in the most venal presidency in the history of
our great country. No other Democrat is as affected by Hillary’s run as
Al Gore.

Finally, the liberal progressive wing of the Democrats is apoplectic
about Al’s rejection of Bill Bradley’s plan to have the government pay
for health insurance for tens of millions of uninsured Americans. The
liberals now know that Big Al is not their friend. That should mean
that they will throw all of their weight behind Bradley’s campaign. Or
will they?

While Big Bill is a far more appealing person that Big Al, he has a
long history in his party of being an independent. To understand
Democrat Party politics is to understand that they don’t cotton to
independent politicians. They are the party of ward politics, group
politics and political spoils.

As a result, Bill Bradley is even more frightening to the liberals
than Al Gore. The liberals know that Al will say anything to get
elected. Nevertheless, they also know that he will do what they require
to service his party. Bill Bradley, they fear, will do what he thinks
best, party be darned. The Democrats don’t want another “free thinker”
at the top of the food chain.

That leads us to Dick Gephardt. Many Americans thought that he meant
it when he said that he was not going to run for President in 2000.
They thought that he was being selfless when he said that he would
concentrate instead on returning control of Congress to the Democrats in
2000. What they didn’t understand is that Dick Gephardt is as sly as a
fox. He knows that 2000 is the last time he can run for the
presidency. Do not expect him to end a life of public service with the
epitaph, “I was afraid to fight Al Gore.”

Dick Gephardt is a very smart man. If Gore can’t pull away from Bill
Bradley, Gephardt knows that Al can’t lay a glove on him.

While Al Gore was wasting millions of dollars of campaign funds
hiring his friends in Washington, D.C., and asking Naomi Wolfe to tell
him how to be a man, Dick Gephardt was crisscrossing America helping
congressional candidates in as many states as he could. No one in his
party has more IOUS than Dick Gephardt. No one in his party is more of
a “party man” than Dick Gephardt. No one in his party is more of a
known commodity than Dick Gephardt. No one, by the way, in his party is
more ambitious than Dick Gephardt.

In November 1997, James Fallows wrote an illuminating Atlantic
Monthly article about Dick Gephardt called, “A Democrat Who Admits
It.” Read this
article and you will understand why liberal progressive Democrats love
Gephardt.

Gephardt believes many things that will probably surprise you. For
example, he thinks that America’s economy has been growing too slowly.
He thinks that we shouldn’t worry about inflation. He really believes
that we don’t need to balance the budget. According to the Atlantic
Monthly article, Dick said,

Remember, what’s the goal? The goal, to me, is growth, high
standard of living, high quality of life. And the fiscal-responsibility
part (the balanced budget) should be part of the strategy to serve that
goal. And I think you best serve (the real) goal by changing your
definition of balance. I like to call it “rough balance.”

He further defines his stand on balancing the budget by adding,

We’ve got to get off this idea that (balance) has to be exactly
mathematically calibrated each and every year or we’re all going to turn
into pumpkins. We’ve got to get people to understand that if you are
below one percent of (GDP) that’s good enough, thank you. We don’t have
to keep turning the wheels here until we destroy everything.

… we have a greater goal, which is to have a higher standard of
living … and higher expectations, and saving the environment, and
having social peace.”

Fallows comments that, for Gephardt, those goals would be more
attainable with an additional “$80 billion a year in public spending.”

At the end of his article, James Fallows says that Dick Gephardt
believes in his heart that “the government deserves to keep and spend
more money.” Fallows reminds us that Gephardt “bitterly opposed
Clinton’s welfare-reform bill.” Fallows says Gephardt’s economic
philosophy is based upon the “claim that a steering role for government
can produce a better outcome than pure laissez-faire.” These are views
that make Dick Gephardt a safe choice for both the Democrat
establishment and the liberal progressive wing of their party.

By the end of the first round of primaries, I believe that Bill
Bradley will prove that Al Gore can’t win his party’s nomination before
the Los Angeles convention. Democrats have a quota system for their
convention that guarantees that the television sees the “right” number
of blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, old people, young people, women,
disabled people and Asians. This quota system doesn’t give these TV
tokens real power. The fathers of the Democrat party do not want there
to be a political donnybrook between Gore and Bradley supporters on the
convention floor.

The best scenario for the Democrats is for Big Al to stumble badly in
the early going. If that happens, the press will finally start tearing
into Bill Bradley. My sources tell me that he is not so pleasant when
he is faced with hostile questioning. As the press starts to expose Big
Bill’s dark side, his party will start casting about for a knight on a
white horse. Guess who has been riding around America as his party’s
savior? That’s right, Dick Gephardt.

If Big Al doesn’t self-destruct, the Democrats may have to allow
their convention to get deadlocked before they can offer Dick Gephardt
as a compromise candidate. They can do that, you know, and they will if
they have to.

Most political realists know that Dick Gephardt is the best candidate
for president that the Democrats have. He owns the party
establishment. Big labor knows and trusts him. He knows the
divide-and-conquer race game by heart. He is his party’s best chance to
hold onto the White House and he will be their nominee.

You may not like Dick Gephardt’s views, but you better learn how to
spell his name. Because it will be on next November’s ballot.